meaning of fork

1. An instrument consisting of a handle with a shank terminating in two or more prongs or tines, which are usually of metal, parallel and slightly curved; -- used from piercing, holding, taking up, or pitching anything.
2. Anything furcate or like a fork in shape, or furcate at the extremity; as, a tuning fork.
3. One of the parts into which anything is furcated or divided; a prong; a branch of a stream, a road, etc. ; a barbed point, as of an arrow.
4. The place where a division or a union occurs; the angle or opening between two branches or limbs; as, the fork of a river, a tree, or a road.
5. The gibbet.
6. To shoot into blades, as corn.
7. To divide into two or more branches; as, a road, a tree, or a stream forks.
8. To raise, or pitch with a fork, as hay; to dig or turn over with a fork, as the soil.
9. fork system> A Unix system call used by a process the "parent" to make a copy the "child" of itself. The child process is identical to the parent except it has a different process identifier and a zero return value from the fork call. It is assumed to have used no resources. A fork followed by an exec can be used to start a different process but this can be inefficient and some later Unix variants provide vfork as an alternative mechanism for this. See also fork bomb.
10. the act of branching out or dividing into branches

Related Words

fork | fork bomb | fork out | fork over | fork up | fork-tailed | forkbeard | forked | forked lightning | forkerve | forkiness | forking | forkless | forklift | forktail | forky |

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